Gender differences in providing peer review to two behavioural science journals, 2006–2015

Peer review is essential to the advancement of scholarly work, but increasing numbers of submitted manuscripts and scholarly journals have led to concerns about obtaining sufficient peer reviews. Given this situation, knowing more about the characteristics of who provides peer review and peer reviewer behaviour could be helpful to editors and journals. This study focused on peer reviewer gender and examined differences in review behaviour by gender among 2,178 peer reviewers for two behavioural science journals over a period of 9 years. Analyses revealed that women were significantly more likely to accept review invitations and took more time to complete reviews than men. We found no gender differences for the total number of invitations to review or for days to respond to invitations. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of concerns about obtaining peer review and for future research on peer review.